Many electronic devices often work in tandem with each other. For example, wearable or accessory electronic devices (such as smart watches) often communicate data, configuration information and/or control information with a companion electronic device (such as a smart phone, a tablet computer or a laptop computer) via a short-range communication protocol, such as Bluetooth® (from the Bluetooth Special Interest Group in Kirkland, Wash.).
However, when the companion electronic device is not proximate to the wearable electronic device, communication via Bluetooth may not be possible. In principle, the companion electronic device and the wearable electronic device can communicate with each other via an intermediate electronic device. For example, the companion electronic device and the wearable electronic device can each communicate with a cloud-based service via an access point in a wireless local area network (WLAN) that is compatible with an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard (which may also be referred to as ‘Wi-Fi’).
In practice, indirect communication via a cloud-based service can be time consuming because of long set-up time needed to establish connections and latency associated with signaling overhead. These time delays may degrade the performance or disrupt time-sensitive applications that are executing on the wearable electronic device and/or the companion electronic device.